The Screengrab : henry fonda

Jack Cardiff, 1914 - 20009

Phil Nugent — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Jack Cardiff, who died last week at the age of 94, was a legend among cinematographers, and a man who spent virtually his whole life working in movies. Born to a show business family, Cardiff acted in silent films as a child, making his movie debut when he was four in a 1918 picture called My Son, My Son. Self-educated, he also haunted art museums, feasting his eyes on the work of Rembrandt and Caravaggio. As he grew into his teens, he branched out into such odd jobs as clapper boy, production runner, and, most fatefully, camera assistant. His first job as full-fledged cinematographer was on Wings of the Morning (1937), starring Henry Fonda, the first British film shot in Technicolor. When the Technicolor representative interviewed him to test his worthiness of the assignment, he asked him, “Which side of the face did Rembrandt light?” Cardiff's reply, which satisfied his interlocutor, was to point to one cheek and then add, "Except when he does etchings; then it’s the other side.” When telling this story in later life, Cardiff admitted that he was only guessing.

In 1946, Cardiff worked for the first time with directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, on A Matter of Life and Death. It was his flamboyantly colorful work on their Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948) that really elevated him to the international A-list. His other credits included Alfred Hitchcock's Under Capricorn (1949) with Ingrid Bergman, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951) and The Barefoot Contessa (1954) with Ava Gardner, John Huston's The African Queen (1951) with Katharine Hepburn, and King Vidor's War and Peace with Audrey Hepburn, which solidified his reputation as a master photographer of beautiful women. He also shot Laurence Olivier's The Prince and the Showgirl (1957), whose leading lady, Marilyn Monroe, once sent him a note reading, “Dear Jack, If only I could be the way you have created me!"

Cardiff, who continued to work as a cameraman up until the last couple of years, also had a side career as a director. His first film as a director was the 1953 The Story of William Tell, starring Errol Flynn. His most distinguished films were the 1960 D. H. Lawrence adaptation Sons and Lovers and 1966's Young Cassidy, starring Rod Taylor as a fictionalized version of the young Sean O'Casey; he also directed Taylor in the 1968 action flick Dark of the Sun, and also made the trippy-ass 1968 Girl on a Motorcycle starring Marianne Faithfull and his last film as director, a Donald Pleasance-Tom Baker horror job called The Mutations (1974). He won the Academy Award for his work on Black Narcissus as well as an honorary Oscar for his life's work in 2001, a year after he was awarded an OBE. The British Society of Cinematographers gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award in 1994.

The Rep Report (March 20 - March 26)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 18:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: BAM starts up its second posthumous tribute to Paul Newman that kicks off with The Long Hot Summer, the project beloved by Newman fans as the one where he and Joanne hooked up, before concentrating on the late-middle end of the actor's long career. Included: Slap Shot (1977), which features the best of his many performances for director George Roy Hill; his Oscar-winning return to the role of Fast Eddie Felsen in Martin Scorsese's The Color of Money (1986); and two films he directed, Rachel, Rachel (1968) starring Joanne Woodward, and the 1971 Ken Kesey adaptation Sometimes a Great Notion, starring Newman and Henry Fonda.

BOSTON: The Boston Underground Film Festival opened last night and runs through the 23rd. The schedule includes Bad Behavior, the latest from professional midnight-slot provocateur Frank Henenlotter (Basket Case, Frankenhooker, Brain Damage), the controversial Deadgirl, and the Von Doviak-approved The Rock-afire Explosion, and a gratifying overflow of shorts.

Take Five: Labor Day

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Usually, the Screengrab's Take Five feature is inspired by some new release coming out the day we go to press. However, sometimes, if the raft of new releases in relatively uninspiring or inappropriate, we go with a different sort of them, and since today is the start of Labor Day weekend, what better time to salute organized labor? After all, some of us are union men ourselves (hey, the National Writer's Union is too a real union! We're part of the United Auto Workers for some reason!); and what with the writer's strike earlier this year that brought the movie business to a near-halt, and the possibility of an actor's strike later in the year coming along to finish what the writer's strike started, America hasn't been this aware of what organized labor is up to in years! Unfortunately, unless Vin Diesel's mercenary Thoorop in Babylon A.D. happens to be a dues-paying member of the International Brotherhood of Hired Killers & Machinegun Operators, there's no new released this holiday weekend that are even remotely about unions or the labor struggle. But that doesn't mean we can't dip back into our video vaults and come up with five fine flicks about working-class struggle for your Labor Day enjoyment. (And, as a special treat before you go back to work on Tuesday, take a few hours to watch Barbara Kopple's masterful Harlan County U.S.A., referenced in last week's Take Five.) Happy Labor Day, readers!

MATEWAN (1987)

Possibly John Sayles' finest film, Matewan depicts -- with the heart of a union man and the eye of an artist -- the brutal struggle to unionize among the West Virginia coal miners of the 1920s, one of the bloodiest periods in the history of organized labor. Based on the Matewan Massacre of 1920 and featuring breathtaking cinematography by Haskell Wexler, Matewan' s powerful story is bouyed by wall-to-wall terrific performances by Chris Cooper, David Strathairn, James Earl Jones, and a young Will Oldham, in his pre-rock star days. Essential.

NORMA RAE (1979)

Martin Ritt's feel-good hit about a scrappy female textile worker who takes on the burden of being the point woman for unionizing the clothing mill in the deep South that employs her hasn't held up particularly well -- it's got a handful of good performances (and won star Sally Field an Oscar), but at times it comes across as a bit hokey. But it still stands as a testament to one of the last flashes of union glory in the U.S. before Ronald Reagan's Republicans started their unrelenting war against organized labor in America. Worth watching as a document of its day.

ROGER & ME (1989)

Sure, nowadays, it's pretty easy even for liberals to make fun of Michael Moore. His insistence on making himself part of his stories has gotten out of hand, and in many ways, he's become the caricature lefty the right has always accused him of being. But in 1989, when he launched his quixotic quest to have just a few words with General Motors CEO Roger Smith and ask him to look at the massive devastation wrought by his moving manufacturing jobs out of Flint, MI to avoid union costs, he seemed like a true breath of fresh air and a voice for the voiceless.

THE GRAPES OF WRATH (1940)

It's almost impossible now to overestimate the impact of John Steinbeck's finest novel and the stirring masterpiece of a film that John Ford made of it. With the sting of the Depression fresh in the minds of millions of viewers -- and with labor conflicts so intense that big agricultural interests in California sought to have the movie banned, just as they removed copies of the book from California libraries -- the gorgeous, moving film was no stolid classic then, but an urgent cry for justice and decency at a time when the country was in its direst of straits.

AMERICAN DREAM (1990)

By the time Barbara Kopple finished her disturbing, heartbreaking documentary about a strike by meat packers at the Austin, MN Hormel plant, Reaganism's determination to crush unions wherever they could be found had already made its tragic story about the slow, tangled dismantling and destruction of a labor negotiating unit a familiar one all over the country. A far more ambiguous work than her Harlan County U.S.A., American Dream nonetheless shows the unremitting sadness of the direction our country took when it allowed ideologues to launch an assault on the hard-won gains of the working class.

Yesterday's Hits: The Longest Day (1962, Andrew Marton, Ken Annakin, and Bernhard Wicki)

Paul Clark — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 19:00:00 GMT

What made The Longest Day a hit?: In 1962, World War II was still fresh in the minds of the American people, most of whom were alive when it was being fought. In the intervening years, movies about the war became popular, but seventeen years after the war was over, super-producer Darryl F. Zanuck decided the time was right to make the biggest war movie of all, focusing on one of the turning points of the war- D-Day. Zanuck called upon Cornelius Ryan to adapt his exhaustive book, which approached the battle through many different perspectives, from the top brass on both sides to the men on the ground, and Zanuck even went so far as to have the French and German soldiers speak their own languages for the film rather than having everyone speak English.

In addition, Zanuck enlisted an impressive cast- one that included John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Robert Mitchum, Richard Burton, Robert Ryan, Rod Steiger, Sal Mineo, Peter Lawford, Roddy McDowell, Curt Jürgens, Jean-Louis Barrault, Red Buttons, and an up-and-comer named Sean Connery- to help him pay tribute to the men who fought and died to help turn the tide for the Allied forces. It worked, and The Longest Day became one of the biggest hits of 1962, grossing almost $40 million domestically, trailing only another pair of super-productions- How the West Was Won and Lawrence of Arabia- at the yearly box office.

What happened?: While the American people saw World War II as both a military and a moral victory, the country was soon to enter into a conflict that wasn’t nearly so simple- Vietnam. As our involvement in Vietnam dragged on for years with no victory in sight, both the soldiers and the people at home were souring on the idea of war, especially as images of various atrocities began showing up on television. After Vietnam, war meant something very different to many Americans than it did after World War II, and the war movies that came out of Hollywood reflected this. The morality of these movies became more complex, with less cut-and-dried heroism and more characters questioning the validity of war. This coincided with the fall of the Production Code, and consequently battle scenes became much bloodier and more chaotic. 1998 brought the most violent mainstream war movie of all, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, whose brutal take on D-Day quickly replaced The Longest Day’s comparatively tame recreation of the battle in the minds of most moviegoers.

Does The Longest Day still work?: Surprisingly, yes. Having been raised on violent, gritty anti-war movies, I expected a star-studded classically-styled movie about Normandy to come off as quaint. But it actually holds up pretty well. Much of this has to do with how its story is told- instead of re-creating the battle from one perspective, we see it from many angles- the Allied generals who planned it, the Germans who didn’t quite anticipate it going down like this, the paratroopers who were dropped inland, the men on the beach, the Resistance fighters, even the residents of the surrounding towns. Because of this, The Longest Day becomes less about morality than it does about tactics and strategy- hardly a contemporary approach to the war movie, but a compelling one nonetheless.

Even the star-studded cast worked better for me than I’d anticipated. Often, casting so many stars can be distracting, with the familiar faces taking the audience right out of the action. But here it’s almost necessary to keep all of the different plot strands straight. It helps that most of the big names are playing officers, so we can remember that Mitchum is leading the boys on Omaha Beach, Fonda heading the charge on Utah, Wayne commanding the paratroopers, and so on. Wayne’s presence is key here- he never fought in World War II himself, but he appeared in so many war movies both during and after the war that he fit the Hollywood mold of a soldier more than most of the stars who actually did fight.

One could make a similar claim for The Longest Day- it didn’t exactly look like war, but the classical Hollywood image of what war ought to look like. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, just a reflection of changing times. At one point in his career, Zanuck famously quipped, “There is nothing duller on the screen than being accurate but not dramatic.” The Longest Day fudged a number of details about D-Day (for example, a key battle takes place at an abandoned casino that hadn’t even been built yet in real life), but from a dramatic standpoint it works. And although it doesn’t correspond to our contemporary idea of what a war movie should be, it’s fascinating as an example of what was once the prevailing popular view of war, from a time when it was easier for us to feel that way.

DVD Roundup for August 26, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week’s bumper crop of Westerns necessitates a temporary name change for this column.

DVD of the Week: 1962’s How the West Was Won may not have been the greatest classic Western ever made, but it was almost certainly the biggest, boasting three directors (Henry Hathaway, John Ford, and George Marshall) and an all-star cast (led by John Wayne, Henry Fonda, James Stewart, Gregory Peck, Debbie Reynolds, and Richard Widmark) to tell a Western family saga spanning half a century. In addition, the film boasting some stunning Western vistas designed to fully exploit the three-screen Cinerama process- this was one of only two narrative features to be exhibited using honest-to-goodness Cinerama. The biggest advantage of this week’s new Ultimate Collector’s Edition (Warner, also Blu-Ray) of the film is that it comes closer than any DVD edition to date to replicating the look of Cinerama in digital form. Instead of the “join lines” and standard 2.35:1 ‘Scope framing of previous editions, this new edition of the film features a new technology that effectively unifies the three Cinerama frames into the original aspect ratio of 2.89:1. There are also a number of special features, notably the 2002 documentary Cinerama Adventure that explores the famed camera process, as well as a trailer, archival featurette, audio commentary, and plenty of collectible memorabilia about the film and its stars. Nothing will be quite like watching How the West Was Won in Cinerama, but this new edition makes the home viewing experience better than ever.

In other oater news, this week also brings the Warner Home Video Western Classics Collection, which includes the 1960 remake Cimarron, Escape From Fort Bravo, Many Rivers to Cross, Saddle the Wind, The Law and Jake Wade, and The Stalking Moon, with each film also sold individually. In addition, Warner is also releasing the Errol Flynn Westerns Box Set (Warner), which contains Montana, Rocky Mountain, San Antonio, and Virginia City. And don’t overlook the Blu-Ray only release of Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider (Warner).

Meanwhile, this week’s recent releases coming to DVD include: Cameron Diaz and Ashton Kutcher in What Happens in Vegas (Fox, also Blu-Ray); David Mamet MMA drama Redbelt (Sony, also Blu-Ray); the acclaimed documentary Chicago 10 (Paramount), Lynch (Ryko Entertainment), a documentary about the ever-popular David Lynch; Uwe Boll’s must-see Postal (Universal Music & Video Distribution), costarring former DVD Digest contributor David Huddleston; and the latest release from our pals at Benten Films, Team Picture.

Other classics coming to DVD this week include: a new pressing of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s notorious final film Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Criterion); the Henry Selick-directed The Nightmare Before Christmas Collector’s Edition (Disney); Jeunet and Caro’s Delicatessen Special Edition (First Look); and Monica Bellucci’s nude body transforming into a rolling landscape for your enjoyment in Brotherhood of the Wolf: Director’s Cut (Universal).

In TV on DVD, there’s Entourage Season 4 (HBO), Everybody Hates Chris Season 3 (Warner), Heroes Season 2 (Universal, also Blu-Ray), NCIS Season 5 (Paramount), and The Shield Season 6 (Sony).

Finally, this week’s action-packed lineup of Blu-Ray only releases includes: Errol Flynn (again) in The Adventures of Robin Hood (Warner); Gov. Schwarzenegger fighting Satan in End of Days (Universal); the first season of NBC’s Heroes (Universal); Crockett and Tubbs hitting the big screen in Michael Mann’s Miami Vice (Universal), and the submarine thriller U-571 (Universal).

Ignominious Exits: The Top Ten Worst Final Films (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Bela Lugosi, PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (1959)

Depending who you ask (specifically if one of the people you ask is Bela Lugosi’s son and the other is Tim Burton), Ed Wood, Jr. was either a talentless, exploitive vulture or a scrappy independent filmmaker who befriended Lugosi late in life and (inadvertently) made him relevant to a whole new audience of younger fans through cult classics like Glen or Glenda? and Bride of the Monster, climaxing with Martin Landau’s Oscar-winning portrayal of the actor in 1994’s Ed Wood. Either way, though, Plan 9 From Outer Space was hardly the most dignified send-off for a Hungarian film and theater legend and one of the best known international movie stars of the 1930s. For one thing, Lugosi only appears onscreen for a few minutes of the so-called “worst movie of all time” (a designation Screengrab’s own Scott Von Doviak would undoubtedly challenge), but the posthumous “performance” (culled from stock footage) isn’t even listed as an official film performance on the actor’s Internet Movie Database page, possibly because it was completed by a chiropractor.

Errol Flynn in CUBAN REBEL GIRLS (1959)

In his prime, Errol Flynn was the last word in swashbuckling action on screen and the most legendary stud in America in real life. (Reports of his bedroom escapades during the war years inspired the optimistic G.I. catch phrase "in like Flynn.") By 1959, though, Flynn was a has-been and a tax deadbeat with a nearly defunct liver. Lacking the energy to do much that might pass for active, never mind acting, he wrote and narrated this low-budget film, in which he appears as a reporter telling us about the "wonderful" rebel girls who are doing their part for the Cuban revolution. Flynn had actually met Fidel Castro, who gave the project his blessing, and the film returns the favor, though it probably had its origins not in political fervor but a mixture of contractual obligation -- Flynn owed somebody a movie -- and cherchez la femme. Cuban Rebel Girls was actually shaped as a vehicle for Beverly Aadland, a talentless would-be actress who was Flynn's steady companion during the last couple years of his life. (She was about fourteen when they met.) The movie was Flynn's last and her only real credit, though the first-time director, Barry Mahon, followed it up with a stream of films, which tend to have such titles as International Smorgas-Broad and Fanny Hill Meets Dr. Erotico. (Another of his flicks, the Cold War paranoia-fest Rocket Attack, U.S.A., made it to the summit of trash that is Mystery Science Theater 3000.) In every compartment of his life -- co-star/girlfriends, directors, revolutionaries -- Errol sure did know how to pick 'em.

Henry Fonda in ON GOLDEN POND (1981)

Henry Fonda had a very long and honorable career, but his last really notable movie role was probably in Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, made when he was in his early sixties. The role of the ruthless but naive professional killer Frank -- the dark side of capitalistism wearing the face of old Hollywood's favorite spokesman for liberal idealism -- gave him a chance to turn his iconic image on its head while doing things he'd never done before as an actor, and that wouldn't have been a bad way to hang it up. But instead he kept at it through the 1970s, plugging away in disposable roles in ever tackier movies (Ash Wednesday, Tentacles, The Swarm, Meteor, etc.). In one way, his final feature film role in On Golden Pond qualified as a comeback: it was, at least, a respectable part in a high-profile prestige release. But it was also an exploitative piece of casting that put the frail-looking, visibly ailing Fonda on screen as a sick, possibly dying old man, and even tapped into gossip about his relationship with his children by casting his real-life rebellious daughter Jane as a character who's constantly lectured about getting over the past and getting on with her life. (How much of a coincidence was it that, at the time, Jane Fonda was in the process of packing up her sixties image as a political firebrand and remaking herself as the yuppie queen of the workout tape?) For audiences, the emotions that the sentimental movie meant to arouse became inseparable from the guilty feelings one might have had about having come to regard the older Fonda as a has-been. The media took the bait and latched onto the movie in a strange way: it basically double-dog-dared the Motion Picture Academy to not give Fonda an Oscar for his performance, knowing that he'd never gotten one before and that he very likely wouldn't have another chance to earn one. The campaign paid off, but at a loss of some dignity for the man at its center.

Click here for Part One & Part Two

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

Summer of ’78: “The Swarm”

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Each Thursday this summer (or Monday, if the disc is late from Netflix) we’ll hop in the Screengrab time machine and jump back thirty years to see what was new and exciting at the neighborhood moviehouse this week in…The Summer of ’78!

The Swarm

Release Date: July 14, 1978

Cast: Michael Caine, Katharine Ross, Richard Widmark, Richard Chamberlain, Fred MacMurray, Henry Fonda

The Buzz: Bees! Get it? The “buzz” is “bees”! I wasn’t even trying to do that! The funny just slipped out of me!

Keywords: Killer Bee, Disaster Film, Mass Child Killing, Child Driving Car, Flamethrower, Science Runs Amok

The Plot: Mysterious doings at a military facility outside the small town of Marysville, Texas have left hundreds of soldiers dead. General Slater (Richard Widmark) arrives on the scene to find a British civilian, entomologist Dr. Brad Crane (Michael Caine) already there. He claims the base has been attacked by a swarm of deadly African bees, but Slater would prefer to believe it’s some sort of commie plot. Slater is further disgruntled when the White House checks in and puts Crane in charge of the entire anti-bee operation. In Marysville, a young boy’s parents are killed by the swarm while picnicking and he narrowly escapes. Later he returns to the scene with some friends, who have the incredibly dumb plan of heaving Molotov cocktails at the swarm. This only angers the bees, who descend on Marysville and kill a bunch of young children in the schoolyard, always a good time at the movies. Proving itself resistant to even the strongest pesticides, the swarm then makes its way toward Houston.

The Test of Time: One of the things I spent way too much time worrying about as a young lad in the ’70s was the swarm of killer bees that we were always being told was making its way up from Africa or South America. It was always about a year or two away – somewhere in Mexico, maybe – and since I had suffered a couple of allergic reactions to bee-stings, resulting in my feet swelling up into purple blobs, I figured this would be the end of me. These fears were fueled by the book The Swarm (not a novelization in this case), but I didn’t see the movie until now. It is, of course, an Irwin Allen production from the tail end of the disaster movie cycle Allen spearheaded. You know, the kind of movie where the poster has a row of boxes with photos of its big name cast running along the bottom, and you expect the last one to say “And Henry Fonda as The President.” (Close; it actually ends with “And Henry Fonda as Dr. Krim.”) Even by Allen’s lax standards, this is one incredibly boneheaded botch – a disaster movie in every sense of the term. The bloated running time extends past the two-and-a-half hour mark, technical incompetence runs rampant – The Swarm features some of the worst day-for-night shots in the history of cinema – and plotlines (courtesy of Oscar-winning screenwriting Stirling Silliphant) tend to vanish without a trace. Although there are hints at some sinister connection between Crane and the bee attack, we never find out how he made his way into the military base. A hokey love triangle subplot involving Fred MacMurray, Ben Johnson and Olivia de Havilland comes to a rather abrupt conclusion when they are all killed in a train derailment. It appears that Allen had some fire-suits left over from The Towering Inferno, which is basically recreated in a battle between flamethrower-wielding soldiers and killer bees. Crane’s solution to the bee crisis is to lure them over the Gulf with the amplified sound of a simulated mating call, then have a bunch of oil tankers dump their loads and set them aflame. I think this could qualify as one of those cures worse than the disease. The Swarm is recommended to all who enjoy laughing at tremendous wastes of time and resources, particularly the DVD version with the deadly serious making-of documentary in which we are informed that “all Irwin Allen movies are rooted in reality” and that, yes, the killer bees will be here any day now.

Quotable Quote: It’s too hard to choose between Caine’s “I never dreamed it would be the bees. They’ve always been our friend!” and Widmark’s “Houston on fire. Will history blame me or the bees?”

2008 Equivalent: This is too easy. Disaster movie + eco-terror + unintentionally hilarious dialogue can only mean The Happening.

Previously on Summer of '78: The Bad News Bears Go to Japan

America the Beautiful: 15 Movies That Show What's Right With U.S. (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 21:00:00 GMT

YOUNG MR. LINCOLN (1939)

One of the most famous lines from any John Ford movie is, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." Not great advice for a reporter, but Ford got away with in this picture, which isn't a straight biopic but a romantic fantasy about the pre-fame Abraham Lincoln (Henry Fonda) as we'd like to imagine it. The movie's script does have a basis in history: the story is built around a murder trial that young Abe took on as a fledgling lawyer. The movie uses this set-up to provide Fonda with the chance to show Lincoln demonstrating his folksy sagacity, his humor, his basic decency and the canniness that would make him a successful politician, but in embryonic form, as a young leading man learning the ropes on his way to becoming a legend. He may not know, as we know, that he's the great Abraham Lincoln. But as we see him figuring out that he has that in him, the movie elevates patriotic corn to the level of folk poetry.

MOSCOW ON THE HUDSON (1984)

Yes, Virginia, Robin Williams used to be good for something. In this melancholy comedy from director Paul Mazursky, Williams slips easily and deeply into the role of a Russian musician who surprises himself by defecting during a trip to New York. It's easy to differentiate this movie from the run of hard-sell, Commie-bashing Cold War movies that Hollywood churned out in the Reagan '80s, and not just because Williams never picks up a machine gun or steps into a boxing ring to beat some patriotic respect into a Russkie villain who's built like a moose. The movie respects the pain of self-exile and the dislocation that comes from the struggle to adjust to a new culture, whether its hero is cursing America after he's been mugged or passing out in a grocery store after suffering a cerebral overload from trying to choose among too many varieties of coffee. Because it sees the craziness in a chauvinistic country composed of immigrants from all over, its tribute to the reasons for taking pleasure and pride in America go down easy, without dishonesty or embarrassment.

JAZZ ON A SUMMER'S DAY (1960)

Bert Stern's record of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival (featuring performances by Thelonious Monk, Louis Armstrong, Mahalia Jackson, Jack Teagarden, Anita O'Day, Dinah Washington, Chuck Berry, Gerry Mulligan, and others who did more for our nation's good name than anybody whose name you've ever seen on a ballet) preserves, without embalming, the sensation of spending a day blissed out in the sunshine sampling the wide range of everybody's favorite indigenous American art form. With cute kids, chilled babes, pretty boats, and no sunburn.

DAVE CHAPPELLE'S BLOCK PARTY (2005)

Top 5 reasons why I love America: (1) freedom of speech, (2) freedom of assembly, (3) our rich, diverse culture, itself a mix-and-match patchwork of multiple overlapping cultures, (4) the ability of all those overlapping cultures to co-exist and mingle while maintaining their own distinct perspectives and points of view and (5) our greatest export, entertainment. All of these elements are in full effect in Dave’s Chappelle’s Block Party, a rollicking concert documentary that manages (like Woodstock and Stop Making Sense before it) to capture a very specific moment in our national timeline. It’s not just a movie, it’s an event...and I don't mean simply the titular block party, an all-day, all-inclusive jam for the residents of one hardscrabble Brooklyn neighborhood (and one lucky Midwestern marching band) featuring undervalued performers like Erykah Badu, the Roots and Jill Scott and socially conscious rappers like Kanye West and Talib Kwelli. Among other things, the film was a fantastically classy, big-hearted, easy-going comeback for Dave Chappelle after his 2005 "meltdown" (actually a shockingly rare example of celebrity integrity). But, more importantly, in this post-9/11, post-Katrina, post-optimistic, pre-apocalyptic era, director Michel Gondry captures a joyfully defiant moment of celebration, hope and community sorely needed but sorely missing from our recent media landscape.

NASHVILLE (1976)

Everyone wants to write the Great American Novel, but very few people even come close. The same thing goes for films, but if any one qualifies for the title of Great American Movie, it's Robert Altman's masterpiece about the events of a single weekend in the country music capitol. Altman was not then and would never be a jingo: Nashville shows us the very worst that people are capable of throughout its running time and right up until its dramatic conclusion. But while it's a movie about America's flaws and deceptions, it's also a movie about America's grace and possibilities, about how little moments of decency and humanity can shine through even at the worst of times. With its sprawling cast and complex characters, we are shown cynicism, deceit, selfishness, callowness, stupidity and cruelty, but we're also shown beauty, honesty, kindness, determination, charity and insight – often from the same people at different times. Like the best and most ambitious art, Nashville attempts to put the world and everything in it within a limited setting and a restricted narrative, and it succeeds not cleanly, but messily, which is the only way it could have succeeded. Made at a crucial time in American history, where the pride many felt at the upcoming national bicentennial conflicted with recent events, including war, economic uncertainty, and political scandal. It couldn't have been more timely, and in its two hours and forty minutes, it does what a great American work of art must do: illustrate what is dreadful about our nation, in order to throw what is glorious about it into sharp relief.

Click here for Part One & Part Two

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce

Film Streams Brings Art Cinema to a Confused but Grateful Omaha

Phil Nugent — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Anyone who grew up in a small town and who was interested in movies that could be read about but not easily seen in the years before Netflix or IFC--there must still be one or two of us--will want to read Eric Konigsberg's touching salute to Rachel Jacobson, founder and proprietor of the Film Streams theater in Omaha, Nebraska, and then maybe shake her hand. (Actually, she might appreciate it more if you'd throw in a couple of bucks. Like Konigsberg, who remembers how tough it was for his "film-buff mother" to deal with the local entertainment options in a place where the movie theaters seldom played "anything that didn’t star Henry Fonda or Benji," Jacobson, 29, is a native Omahan, and "is anything but a snob about Omaha — she’s just a film snob." After graduating from the University of Illinois with a major in film studies, Jacobson lit out for New York City and spent five years takinga course in arts administration at NYU (where she had to write "mock press releases" for an imaginary retrospective of films by Alexander Payne) and working for nonprofit arts organizations--galleries, WNYC, theater organizations--all so that she could develop the savvy to return to Omaha and start a nonprofit movie theater. The idea of starting a movie theater in Omaha with an eye towards showing foreign and indie movies for profit was not something that she ever viewed as an option. Not-for-profit is "the only business plan that allows you to show good movies. The multiplexes have just taken over, especially in cities like this.”

Even so, it's been an uphill battle. Jacobson started laying the floorboards in 2005 and got Film Streams up and running last summer. In between, she had to make her case to such potential contributors as the gentleman who "asked if there was a language barrier when we showed foreign films. Not everybody knows about subtitles.” She adds, “I lived in New York for five years after college, and I came back to Omaha with the attitude that everyone gets it. So I was a little bit wrong about that.” She hung in there, though, and now, Konigsberg writes, "The list of people and institutions in Omaha with a national presence is short (and overlapping), but a look at the names of the biggest contributors to Film Streams, affixed to a wall in the theater lobby, suggests that Ms. Jacobson was able to reach most of them." Among the names on the wall is that of Alexander Payne, who, Jacobson says, "comes back to Omaha once a month to see his parents.” It's a small world after all.

"The Pervert's Guide to the Cinema" in The Believer

Phil Nugent — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Slavoj Zizek may not exactly be overexposed in movies, but he's come closer to it than any other Slovenian film theorist, Lacanian philosopher, and sometime presidential candidate I can think of. (The Guardian once called him "the Elvis of philosophy", ignoring Elvis's famous statement that he thought that Lacan was "about as funny as a turd in a punchbowl.") A couple of fall festival seasons back, the bearded, bearish Zizek could be seen pontificating about such subjects as Hitchcock and David Lynch, The Exorcist and The Matrix, in Sophie Fiennes's two-and-a-half-hour The Pervert's Guide to the Cinema, which was at least the third film documentary built around his gruff-accented rumblings, and which was widely acclaimed as his definitive star turn. The movie has yet to be distributed here in theaters or on DVD, but you can watch a fifty-minute chunk of it on a DVD that comes with "The 2008 Film Issue" of The Believer. In a brief accompanying tribute, Jason McBride describes Zizek's approach in this film essay as "dialectical materialism for the multiplex." I don't know what that means, but it sure is catchy.

Earlier film directors (including Alfonso Cuaron, who included Zizek among the list of all-star bigbrains who appeared in The Possibility of Hope, the documentary short that was included as a bonus on the Children of Men DVD, which also included a Zizek commentary track) have been content to stick a camera in front of Zizek and watch him spout. Finnes, trying to supply some cinematic fireworks to match the stream of words pouring out of her star, provides him with settings drawn from the film clips that are intercut with his monologue; we see him sitting in a chair in Norman Bates's basement, sitting across from Laurence Fishburne's Morpheus and demanding, "I vant a third pill!", steering the boat taking Tippi Hedren to Rod Taylor's island home in The Birds (the title of which Zizek pronounces as "The Burks"), and in Dorothy Vallens's apartment in Blue Velvet, passively observing her mating ritual with Frank Booth. (Disappointingly, he and Frank don't pass the inhaler back and forth.) At first it seems like a cute gimmick, but it begins to feel like the logical next step in Zizek's approach. He loves movies, but he also has mixed feelings about their hold on them, the way they invade and impose themselves on his dream life. Spinning theories about where these images come from and how they work is his way of fighting back and reclaiming some territory within his own inner space; Fiennes makes it possible for him to escape the lecture room and take the fight to his subject's home turf. In addition to the DVD (and the already-notorious Werner Herzog-Errol Morris conversation), there are a few other things in the magazine that aim to get at the movies' assaults on our dreams, and our conscious minds' efforts to stand their ground, that might do Zizek proud. Notable among them are the tribute to the late Leonard Schrader's vast collection of lobby cards,, and Devin McKinney's persuasive argument, which bows to neither purists nor James Stewart partisans, that Henry Fonda should have played Scottie in Vertigo.

DVD Digest for March 11, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week finds the recently-anointed Best Picture Oscar winner coming to DVD, as well as some long-overlooked genre offerings, adrift of sea of junk both old and new. In other words, sort of like every week here at DVD Digest.

DVD of the week: What else could it be but No Country for Old Men (Buena Vista, also Blu-Ray)? The film's DVD contains some interesting-looking featurette, including a making-of with the Coens, but the primary reason I'm including it here is because when a legitimately great film is honored with the Best Picture Oscar, it's a cause for celebration. Say what you will about the falling fortunes of the Academy Awards, but the Oscar name still means something to people, and the award should bring No Country a bigger home-viewing audience than it would have had otherwise. Yes, I realize there will almost certainly be a super-deluxe edition of the film in six months or so, one which will hopefully include an Easter egg of Henry Kissinger: Man on the Go. But especially in a relatively slow week for DVD (no major box sets, no Criterions), I'd say the arrival of No Country in home-viewing form constitutes an event.

In other new releases, this week brings Paramount's tiresomely overhyped Bee Movie; Steve Carell and Juliette Binoche in Dan in Real Life (Buena Vista, also Blu-Ray); the John Woo-wannabe Hitman (Fox, also Blu-Ray); August Rush (Warner, also Blu-Ray); the misbegotten Caine/Law/Branagh remake of Sleuth; last summer's largely forgotten updating of Nancy Drew (Warner); and the anime DVD Appleseed Ex Machina (Warner, also Blu-Ray).

On the classics front, the week's big news is the three new titles in Fox's ever-growing selection of film noir on DVD: Ginger Rogers in Black Widow, Jeanne Crain in Dangerous Passage, and Joan Crawford and Henry Fonda in Otto Preminger's Daisy Kenyon. Daisy Kenyon in particular has enjoyed a critical resurgence during the past year, and I'm eager to check it out now that it's finally available again. Other titles of note include the Al Pacino double feature of ...And Justice For All and Bobby Deerfield (both Sony), and a new special edition of Gattaca (Sony, also Blu-Ray). The week's Blu-Ray-only releases include Dogma (Sony), I, Robot (Fox), and Independence Day (Fox).

Finally, David Huddleston offers his condolences to the following HD-DVD releases:

Bee Movie (Paramount)
In the Valley of Elah (Warner)
Michael Clayton (Warner)
Fletch (Universal)

I don't know about you, but $20 seems a lot to pay for what will likely be used as a Fletch drink coaster in a few months' time. Although if you use it to hold your Bloody Mary while you eat a steak sandwich and a steak sandwich, perhaps it'll be worth it to you.

Famous Last Words: Round 1, Week 5

Paul Clark — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

It seems that most high schoolers in the U.S. have to sit through a screening of Sidney Lumet's 12 Angry Men at least once in civics class. But with its totemic presence as the pre-eminent celebration of American jurisprudence, it's sometimes overlooked how terrific it is as a film. Reginald Rose's justly acclaimed screenplay has spawned hundreds of regional theatre productions and at least two remakes. But none has quite lived up to the original, which is a tribute to both the excellent ensemble- which includes Henry Fonda, Martin Balsam, Lee J. Cobb, E.G. Marshall, Jack Klugman, Jack Warden, and Ed Begley- and Lumet's direction, which turns the jury room where nearly all the action takes place into a kind of pressure cooker as the day drags on. Congrats to all those who guessed it.

This week, we've got another multi-line quote for you. See if this rings a bell:

“I think I’m all right.”
“Maybe the next time, darling. Maybe the next time."

As always, submit your guesses to famouslastwords@nerve.com. For a list of rules, click right here. And remember, all guesses for this week's quiz are due in by next Wednesday at 11:59 PM Eastern. Good luck!

Top Thirteen Greatest Fictional Movie Presidents, Part 2

Peter Smith — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 22:00:00 GMT

Sandy McCallum as Mr. President/David Carradine as President Frankenstein, DEATH RACE 2000 (1975)

In many ways, Sandy McCallum's "Mr. President" in the sci-fi satire Death Race 2000 was a political leader far ahead of his time. He was a charismatic evangelical in tune with the religious right (he began all his presidential addresses with the line "My children, whom I love"); he remained sequestered in his vacation home even in times of crisis (what is Mr. President's fabled Winter Palace in Beijing but a slightly more grandiose version of the big ranch in Crawford?), and most importantly, he struck home with the American people by isolating and identifying the sole cause of all our national woes, foreign and domestic: the hated French! Still, every great leader's time must eventually pass, and when Mr. President finally lost his life in a freak automotive accident, his successor (likewise ahead of the curve: a popular athlete who parlayed his celebrity status into a career in politics), the wonderfully named President Frankenstein, took over. At first, America was worried — the new president, with his outspoken First Lady and his program of progressive reform, seemed like he might be some sort of bleeding-heart liberal — but our minds were eased when his first official act in office was to run over pesky news media personality Junior Bruce with his car. America loves you, President Frankenstein!

Jeff Bridges as President Jackson Evans, THE CONTENDER (2000)

President Evans is a supporting character in this dull message movie about the trouble his female vice-presidential nominee (Joan Allen) has in getting approved, but he's also the movie's wild card, a slick charmer who isn't actively opposed to doing the right thing whenever possible but mostly seems interested in winning with a minimum of confrontational hassle. His hobby is torturing the staff of the White House kitchen by testing their ability to serve him anything he asks for at any hour of the day; at one point he's spotted wandering the halls and ignoring the person talking to him while munching his latest snack and muttering, "Shark steak. Fuckin' shark steak sandwich. . ."

Henry Fonda as The President, FAIL-SAFE (1964)

This grim melodrama, in which American bombers nuke Moscow because of a technical error, opened some ten months after Dr. Strangelove, an unusual case of the straight version of a story coming after the parody. Actually, this version is fairly funny if you watch it now in the wrong spirit. The nameless president winds up averting World War III by ordering a nuclear strike on New York City to make it up to the Russians, even though the First Lady happens to be in the Big Apple. The movie also came out the same year as The Best Man, in which Fonda played a presidential candidate too pure in heart to develop the killer instinct needed for the job. Fifteen years later he would play the U.S. president again, this time in the disaster movie Meteor. (And let's not forget that one of his early roles was as Young Abe Lincoln in the John Ford classic.) Maybe the real question posed by Fail-Safe is, if Hollywood is such a bastion of liberal bias, then how come every time Fonda, the movie star known as the embodiment of liberal humanism, got cast as the leader of the free world, half the planet wound up in danger of obliteration?

Franchot Tone as The President, ADVISE AND CONSENT (1962)

When Otto Preminger's Washington melodrama opened, New York Times reviewer Bosley Crowther glowered at it through his lorgnette and wrote that the filmmakers' "intense and deliberate projection of a cynical attitude toward the actions of politicians extends right up to the President of the United States, whom they frankly portray in this fiction as a man of peculiar principles. He is made (in a tasteless portrayal of a sick, testy man by Franchot Tone) to be tolerant of cheap conniving and the telling of lies under oath." Translated into English, this means that Tone's character is one of the few movie presidents one can imagine actually running the country, a tough, hard-bitten old son of a bitch who knows how to play the game. Unfortunately, we all have our bad days, and he comes to grief after he makes the mistake of trying to appoint — it's him again! — Henry Fonda as Secretary of State. Tone's president, worn out from political machinations and Fonda's high-minded dithering, ultimately succumbs to a heart attack, leaving the country in the hands of his vice-president, Lew Ayres, who makes Hank Fonda look like Solomon crossed with Sean Connery.

Bill Pullman as President Thomas J. Whitmore, INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996) and Gene Hackman as President Alan Richmond, ABSOLUTE POWER (1997)

Taken together, these two films, originally released a little more than six months apart, go a long way towards summing up the Clinton presidency as it was filtered through different fantasy lenses in the popular culture of its time. Pullman's president is, like President Bartlett on The West Wing, a fantasy of an improved Bill Clinton, the Clinton that some disappointed observers wanted him to be: a sensitive liberal-minded family man, but with a record of military heroism (in the first Gulf War) and the ability to keep his dick in his pants. When the movie opens, he's struggling to keep his job as the media and his political enemies paint him as spineless and ineffectual, but the extraterrestrial invasion gives him the chance to show what he's made of: he dusts off his flight suit and kicks a little alien butt, albeit only after the destruction of the White House and the death of his First Lady. (She's played by Mary McDonnell, who wound up getting her own TV presidency after robots took their turn trying to wipe out the human race on Battlestar Galactica.) President Richmond represents Clinton the defiler, the rampaging amoral deviant unfit for polite society, let alone high office; the film's director-star, Clint Eastwood, has to take matters into his own hands and bring about justice after he's seen Richmond's Secret Service bodyguards kill a woman who was trying to defend herself from a violent sexual assault at POTUS's hands. The cover-up is handled by the president's evil, female chief of staff (Judy Davis), a Hillary even he couldn't bring himself to marry. Oddly enough, Absolute Power also laid the seeds for a future TV presidency: one of Richmond's murderous goons is played by Dennis Haysbert, who later became the martyred President David Palmer on 24.

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov

Check back tomorrow for Part 3!